Monthly Archives: August 2011

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology

Apple is More than a One Man Band

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So today the news that many have been expecting for a while came, Steve Jobs is resigning as CEO of Apple – although he is remaining as chairman. There was also the predictable nose dive in the Apple share price. But why?

Jobs has been on medical leave since the beginning of the year, indeed it is his third bout of medical leave over the past few years, but Apple has continued to grow. The news has been expected, and yes whilst it is undeniably sad news, it is perhaps more sad on a personal level for Steve and his family than anything else.

Whilst the markets may see Apple as some sort of glorified sole trader, it isn’t. Whilst the company may have been driven by Jobs, to do that he has brought together a strong team, in particular it has been Tim Cook who is credited with the efficiencies in the Apple supply chain, and Jonathan Ive who is credited with the design of pretty well every Apple product over recent years. There is also a team of dedicated software engineers who have produced MacOS X and iOS, it’s not all Steve Jobs.

Undeniably things will gradually change with Steve Jobs stepping back, but all the key team members that Jobs has put in place will remain, so Apple is not going to instantly implode just because Steve Jobs has resigned. The company will continue. This is a sad moment in the story of Apple, not the end of the story. However if Tim Cook decides to buy a software company, drops iOS and flogs off all the stock of iPhone’s, iPod’s and iPad’s at 70% discount and decides to sell of Mac production because there is more money to be made in software services…

Computers/Technology

Lessons from the HP Touchpad Firesale

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Okay, I admit it, I was one of the people trying to get a 70% discounted HP Touchpad. I wasn’t alone, a work colleague queued up at the former Dixons Store (can’t remember what DSG are calling it this week) to get one last night.

Neither of us were successful. Like many people wanting a bargain both here and in the USA, we were disappointed. There are a couple more retailers who have yet to discount, but word is that their stock is pretty well non-existent too.

So what can we learn from this whole debacle? Firstly, £89/£115 is a really popular price point for a tablet. Sadly it’s not a realistic price point for a tablet, so unless someone uses a model like the console manufacturers and sells their hardware at a loss, it’s not happening again.

What is perhaps more interesting is the flaws it shows up in many of the biggest names in retailing.

The Dixons group started the rush, and whilst their site didn’t totally crash there were a number of annoyed potential customers who found products disappearing from their shopping carts before they could purchase.

Best Buy UK again kept their site running, but again customers had products disappear from their shopping cart – it happened twice to me.

Carphone Warehouse had their site drop off the Internet several times during the evening, but more annoyingly for customers they revealed that they suffered the same issue as Barnes and Noble in the USA, fantasy stock levels. With both companies this left them having to write e-mails to customers who thought they had confirmed orders telling them that they didn’t.

Comet never actually cut their online price, but were matching the Dixons Group price, their site didn’t crash, but ran exceedingly slowly, and again produced annoyed customers who had stock availability when they started, but discovered stock had run out when they reached the end of the buying process.

At the end of the evening speculation over an Argos price cut kicked off so there was a run on product reservations at Argos stores. This again showed a flaw in the Argos stock levels whereby the site would say stock was available at a particular store, but once the reservation was made you’d receive an automated e-mail saying that it wasn’t.

So what are all these problems with stock?

Let’s take a look at offline shopping. When you go into a supermarket to buy a packet of cornflakes, you physically pick up the box and put it in your trolley – effectively one item of the stock is allocated to you.

That isn’t what happens online. Instead the site checks the overall stock level when you pick an item. That stock level is not updated until later in the process, sometimes when you pay, other sites even later. If for example a retailer had ten Touchpad’s in stock, but one hundred people simultaneously accessed the site, all one hundred get told there is stock.

If like BestBuy UK your stock updates are instantaneous customers find products vanishing from their shopping carts during the process as the ten quickest get their details entered into the site. For the Barnes and Nobles you get one hundred customers who think they’ve bought a Touchpad, but you have to e-mail ninety of them cancelling the order.

So why do online retailers do it like this? The simple answer is it’s cheaper, and on a normal day it will rarely happen that there is a rush on a particular product – it’s just that when someone discounts a product by 70% and everyone wants one, the flaw gets shown up in spectacular fashion.

Apple/Mac, Computers/Technology, iPad

Dear Steve

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Dear Steve,

Yesterday we headed down to the opening day of your new store in Festival Place, Basingstoke. First off I have to say that after many years having to either head into London or drive a long way to find an Apple Store it is great having two within a short drive, with you having opened a store in the Oracle, Reading just last month. We did avoid the craziness in the morning but we had a great time none the less.

I went along with my two year old daughter, who has been using Apple products for pretty well all of her life. It didn’t take long for her to get the hang of the touchscreen interface on my iPhone, iPod and iPad, indeed now she expects most devices to have such a screen and gets frustrated when they don’t. This brings me to a first suggestion, your children’s area. Whilst it is nice having a low level table, and child sized seating, the devices there are all Mac’s. Although children do quite easily pick up the concept of a mouse and pointer, my daughter is much happier with the direct interaction of a touch screen – as you have said on a number of occasions recently, we’re living in a post PC world now.

Look where we ended up... As a result we went to look at the iPad’s which do have children’s software installed, but are all on tables at a very child unfriendly height. In the end my daughter asked for a chair, and one of your excellent staff kindly obliged with a stool from the Genius Bar.

As you can see from the picture that put her on just the right height to play some games on the iPad.

Games weren’t the only thing we tried. My daughter wanted to talk to Mummy, so we thought we’d try out another of the features of the iPad – Facetime.

We have used your video calling application quite frequently at home – calling between Apple products it seems to pretty consistently produce a better quality video connection than the most obvious competitor Skype, indeed in one situation recently Facetime made a connection easily when Skype couldn’t get through at all. However as I’m sure you’re aware Facetime only works over wi-fi.

No problem of course as your stores have free wi-fi. Looking at the strength display it had a full strength signal, however it fairly obviously was not a good internet connection, the demonstration iPad struggled to produce a reasonable picture with a decidedly low quality result. It would certainly be worthwhile investing in some faster wi-fi connections for the store to enable a good demonstration of this feature.

Anyway, one last idea which comes from my daughter – she would like you to provide beds at the Apple Store so she doesn’t have to go home. The store kept her occupied and entertained for all of a wet afternoon, and she didn’t want to leave! I did eventually manage to get her out and heading home, but I am sure we will be back.

Yours,

An Apple Owning Parent

 

General

Beth and Richard Get Married (The Movie)

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Last Thursday we celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary, well at least as much as you can with two small children and summer colds going around the family!

Anyway, one of the things that the tenth wedding anniversary actually got me to organise was getting a copy of our wedding video into a more usable form. The video was shot by a friend of ours who shot on NTSC DV, and then produced a copy for us that we could watch back in the UK. They also kindly gave us the master tape. Needless to say technology has moved on in ten years, so what I wanted to do was get the wedding video into a form where I could keep it properly backed up on the computer, plus with a copy online. Whilst most DVD players and Bluray players will quite happily cope with NTSC recordings, finding a DV camera that could had proved rather more difficult, but thankfully I found a specialist company over in Twyford called DigitalCopyCat who we could drop the tape off with in person who would produce a QuickTime file of the wedding that I could easily handle on the Mac from our NTSC Master tape.

We now have that file converted into an Apple TV ready form so we can watch it back on the main TV, and also uploaded to my Vimeo account so you too can enjoy the wedding video – indeed most of our UK friends and relatives will never have seen this I’m sure!

Watching it back certainly brings back a few memories. There are of course quite a few people who are sadly no longer with us, for example neither Pastor K’Henry or Rev’d Sheila our Rector from Finchampstead who came over for the wedding are with us any more. There are also several relatives such as Beth’s grandmother, and Aunt Kathy who have passed away since.

On a lighter note you do get to see me pacing up and down wondering where the grooms parents and Best Man have got to (they managed to take a wrong turn on the way to the church and were driving around the army base at Ralston),  plus me in a suit that I might just about fit into again now, but for the best part of ten years haven’t been able to. There are also quite a few of the family looking younger and less stressed before they had their children!

Anyway, the video is over an hour long as it’s got the whole service, plus speeches and cake cutting and so on at the reception, so enjoy a little bit of a flashback to ten years ago.

Also if you’ve got any films or slides, videos or so forth that you want converted to something digital I can heartily recommend DigitalCopyCat – great service, especially with all the bouncing back and forth to get the format I wanted for the Mac, and at a good price too.

Geocaching

Dogs

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One thing I’ve found with all my walking of late is that there are a surprising number of people with very little control of their dogs. I guess I’m pretty aware of it as if ever I’m out with Lucy she has a total meltdown whenever we meet a dog not on a lead.

To be fair this isn’t an irrational fear. A few months back we were walking in the Swinley Forest and a bull terrier of some variety jumped up at her. It didn’t seem unfriendly, but considering that she was about the same size as the dog and started screaming, which then made it more curious. The owner was a long way away up the path, shouted at it for a bit before coming and grabbing it, barely mumbled an apology before putting the dog on a lead until he’d walked about a quarter of a mile ahead of us.

Compare this to what happened a couple of weeks back when I was out walking a path in Farley Hill. Coming in the other direction was a man with a lovely red setter. The dog was off the lead and exploring the bushes and path ahead. The dog saw me and started to trot towards me. The key difference was that the man was paying attention to what the dog was doing, whistled, at which point the dog stopped, turned and trotted back to him. The dog then walked to heel past me and carried on. No barking at me, no jumping up, and no lead needed.

Sadly there are precious few owners who take their time to properly train their dogs. Yesterday I passed one woman vainly wondering where her dog was before shouting at it as it chased the cows in the nearby field. There was also a father and son with an Alsatian off the lead again shouting at the dog as the dog just blindly ignored them.

I’ve lost track of the number of owners for whom the usual response to their animals jumping up, and if I’ve got Lucy with me she’s usually shaking by this time, is a shrug.

It’s not only me that has a problem, there are several farms whose land is crossed by public footpaths I’ve come across that are quite clear that they will shoot dogs that are running loose in the livestock fields.

Dogs are certainly not untrainable, it’s just that people don’t take the time to do it properly. It’s not really a new problem either.

Quite what we do about Lucy remains to be seen, certainly her having a meltdown doesn’t help. Beth has said that she is now starting to have problems around cats as well – it being over a year since Sophie died. Perhaps for a start we’ll need to get a new cat, and get her used to having animals around, slowly working up to getting her less petrified around dogs.